The market is not huge itself, but it grows like in many european countries.
And people bring money both to developers and to black-money trade market (which is less controlled than in USA) via websites, SMS services…

This fact (RMT popularity) is supported with:

1. The audience is ready.These people are ready to pay real money for some stuff that is better than the others have.
2.The games I’m talking about were designed to be RMT based. Especially developed inside the country. And the market is full of MMOs
3.Russian MMO audience is much more hardcore in percentage than in other markets (exept corean)
4. People like to be blinded (I’m not bying the box, not paying any money and I can play). And the situation is the same: some are paying, some are not paying . This fact just attracts people — If I want I won’t pay any money at all
5. RMT and Microtransactions are mostly popular in browser MMO games, which are easy to start/easy to pay

It doesn’t stop RTM on the other servers, nor will it. It simply puts a ceiling on RTM pricing.

And if people who do spend money to skip past the time grind in a game are ‘brats’ than I must give those who do not a nickname as well.

Bandwagoning Sheep.

It should be possible to buy game items with real cash, through official channels. If you ban something, you only drive it underground where it cannot be controlled. This is what happens today. Macro’ing bastards are ruining the early-game of many MMO’s to accrue game currency for resale - the methods they use to acquire the currency are far more damaging than the actual sale of the currency for dollars. By allowing players to buy *items* through official channels, their industry would be sunk.

Only items should be for sale, not game currency, because currency is too powerful. Items can be bound to the player who bought them, preventing them from being resold and polluting the game’s economy. Additionally, the items could be made utterly generic so that everyone knows that the player is using items that weren’t found in the game. The appearance of the real item should be different, if not customizable.

It is very important to distinguish between bought items and game items. I don’t mind being ganked but I’d like to know whether my attacker is worthy of my respect or my scorn.

Alternatively, split the game into cash-driven and non-cash-driven servers. Let the brats with the dollars run around on one server and give the serious players their own server. (Allow characters to be transfered only one way.) (It would be important to sell currency for the one server at extremely low prices to defeat the macro’ing bastards.)

if the effort of spending hours getting a virtual item is your cup of tea (still? really now, I call your bluff), then do just that.

For me the time needed to advance a tiny amount in games these days is rediculous. I’ll spend my time at work earning a better return on investment and just buy the item.

While some players may be paying nothing and others may be spending less than a normal subscription fee, your most loyal players will be spending significantly more than a normal subscription fee (this has to be the case if you intend to average out to make the same as a subscription-based MMO).

Woops! As soon as these incredibly loyal players realize they are paying out their ears to play your game, they may very well stop playing.

Actually, if you’re doing digital item purchases/microtransactions correctly, I’d argue that these loyal players want to pay out their ears in order to maximize their game experience. To jump back to the getting-to-be-rather-overused golf analogy, golf enthusiasts are not required to purchase expensive golf clubs to play at any particular level, but they generally do so because they love the game and the super special awesome bag of golf clubs will really enhance the experience for them.

In Puzzle Pirates, $10 buys you 42 Doubloons. 42 Doubloons will unlock all the crew ranks to you for a month, as well as allow you to pick up a pretty nice outfit and a sword or blunt weapon, all of which will last you for 90 days. Alternatively, it can also unlock the higher officer ranks for you for a month, as well as buy you a new ship and some furniture for your house, which are both pretty much permanent. All of this is just icing: the basic game, such as playing puzzles or card games with other players or pillaging with a crew/guild, is free. The point is that if your DIPS/microtransaction game is structured as crippleware that’s intended to exploit your playerbase out of cash, your playerbase will have reason to hate the excess cost. But if you’ve designed your item sales to merely complement the part of your game that you provide free of charge, the ’significant’ extra spending that players will partake in will be done so with glee.

That said, those people would only be paying even MORE than I’d guessed. The thing with any kind of RMT that gives you more breadth of gameplay is that the really dedicated players will want it all, and in order for the business model to be viable, the “all” must be more than $15/month (and for the RMT games I’ve played/looked at, it is).

Which means these people would have more than just one account that they’d be paying more than $15 a month for, making it more and more expensive.

Theoretically, you could decide to allow more than one character from a single account to play at one time in an RMT model, but you could do the same for standard subscriptions (I’d bet the majority of multi-account holders have multiple accounts for simultaneous play, not for more character slots… while more character slots were attractive back in the day, I think we’re giving people enough slots these days that it’s usually not necessary to have multiple accounts for the sake of character count).

While some players may be paying nothing and others may be spending less than a normal subscription fee, your most loyal players will be spending significantly more than a normal subscription fee (this has to be the case if you intend to average out to make the same as a subscription-based MMO).

Woops! As soon as these incredibly loyal players realize they are paying out their ears to play your game, they may very well stop playing.

Dude… a look at the CURRENT traditional MMO stats shows this not to be the case. Most hardcore players already pay “significantly more than a traditional subscription fee.” In fact, the mean number of accounts per user is over 2! At the high end, it’s not unusual to see 10+ accounts in the hands of one user. That’s an average of double payment for an average user, and it’s $150 a month for a high end user.

That’s not a new or unusual stat, either. There’s metrics going back to the online services days on stuff like GEnie and CompuServe showing people paying well over $1000 a month.

And that’s not counting people who buy gold or other stuff… that is also a way of spending more money than the sub fee on their hobby.

Nobody RMT’s in the GAME of Warcraft. It is in the WORLD of Warcraft that they do this. Ironic that it is the gamers, not the worlders, who drive RMT, then, isn’t it? Here’s a little bit of real money so I can skip your world parts and go straight to the game.